A mail insertion system or a “mailpiece inserter” is commonly employed for producing mailpieces intended for mass mail communications. Such mailpiece inserters are typically used by organizations such as banks, insurance companies and utility companies for producing a large volume of specific mail communications where the contents of each mailpiece are directed to a particular addressee. Also, other organizations, such as direct mailers, use mailpiece inserters for producing mass mailings where the contents of each mailpiece are substantially identical with respect to each addressee.
In many respects, a typical inserter resembles a manufacturing assembly line. Sheets and other raw materials (i.e., a web of paper stock, enclosures, and envelopes) enter the inserter system as inputs. Various modules or workstations in the inserter system work cooperatively to process the sheets until a finished mail piece is produced. The precise configuration of each inserter system depends upon the needs of each customer or installation.
Typically, inserter systems prepare mall pieces by arranging preprinted sheets of material into a collation, i.e., the content material of the mail piece, on a transport deck. The collation of preprinted sheets may continue to a chassis module where additional sheets or inserts may be added based upon predefined criteria, e.g., an insert being sent to addressees in a particular geographic region. From the chassis module the fully developed collation may continue to a stitched module where the sheet material may be stitched, stapled or otherwise bound. Subsequently, the bound collation is typically folded and placed into envelopes. Once filled, the envelopes are closed, sealed, weighed, and sorted. A postage meter may then be used to apply postage indicia based upon the weight and/or size of the mail piece. The mailpieces will then be moved to a stacker where mailpieces are collected and stacked, either on edge or laid flat. An exemplary on-edge stacker, or vertical stacker, is depicted in U.S. Pat. No. 6,398,204 titled On-Edge Stacking Apparatus, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
In a final step, the mailpieces are manually removed by an operator from the stacker and placed into mail trays or other storage containers. Such manual collection and removal is pragmatic, reliable and fiscally advantageous when the time of mailpiece removal can be shared and/or absorbed within the overall labor requirements associated with managing/operating the mailpiece inserter system. That is, this task can be efficiently performed when sufficient idle time exists between various other operational tasks, e.g., removing out-sorted mailpieces, cleaning/removing paper dust from various optical readers/scanning devices, etc., to periodically or intermittently unload the mailpiece stacker.
Advances in the art of mailpiece inserters have vastly increased the total mailpiece volume and rate of mailpiece production. For example, the Advanced Productivity System (APS) inserter system produced by Pitney Bowes Inc., located in Stamford, Conn., USA, can produce as many as twenty-six thousand (26,000) mailpieces in one hour of operation. Accordingly, hundreds of mail trays, collectively weighing over 11,000 lbs, must be removed and transported each hour by a system operator. In fact, the volume of mailpieces produced is sufficiently large that several system operators may be required to concentrate on the single/sole task of mailpiece collection and removal. Aside from the time associated with this final unloading step, it will be appreciated that the collection, removal and transport of such large mailpiece quantities can be highly demanding in terms of the physical workload. It will also be recognized that such physical demands can lead to inconsistent or reduced mailpiece throughput if/when the workload requirements are not properly balanced with the high volume mailpiece output.
A need, therefore, exists for an apparatus for stacking mailpieces produced by high volume mailpiece inserters, which apparatus ensures consistent throughput, is fiscally advantageous and provides a viable alternative to manual mailpiece collection and removal.
Prior art systems that have attempted to meet this need include: (i) a device that lifts mail trays onto their side to receive pre-formed stacks of envelopes (U.S. Pat. No. 7,600,751); (ii) a stationary device that individually fed envelopes into a mail tray that had been lifted up from below (U.S. Pat. No. 6,536,191); and (iii) a device that dropped vertical stacks of envelopes into mail trays using a trap-door arrangement (U.S. Pat. No. 5,347,790).